Disgrace - The Movie!

Disgrace is based on J.M. Coetzee's prize winning novel. Disgrace is a confronting and brutal tale of our lives... to be specific to the movie, the South African Post Apartheid life. The message is clear. There are no simple solutions!

David Lurie has had several wives but he "wasn't made for marriage." A womanizer, a sensualist, at 52 he's losing his physical attraction; he's looking old. Even his Malay prostitute lets him go. He forces himself upon Melanie Isaacs (Antoinette Engel), a mixed-race student in his romantic poetry class. When they have sex, she turns away as if repelled, but she submits. He's found out and threatened by Melanie's boyfriend, yelled at by her father, boycotted by the students, and at an administrative hearing he's so unrepentent he ends by being forced to leave the college. He goes to the Eastern Cape where his lesbian daughter Lucy has recently been abandoned by her lover. She grows flowers and vegetables she sells in the local market, and she arranges for David to help Bev (Fiona Press), a middle-aged lady whose animal shelter work consists primarily of euthanizing unwanted dogs. In and out of the property he now shares with Lucy is Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), an almost mythically neutral, philosophical black man who owns land there and is gradually taking over, but who also made Lucy's garden land arable.

Then enters the outside horror. Three young black men appear when Lucy and David are returning from a walk and ask to use her phone. They invade the house, rape Lucy, nearly kill David, and shoot all Lucy's dogs, wrecking the interior of the house and stealing David's car. One pours a bottle of methyl spirits over David and sets fire to him, locking him in the bathroom.

This sequence, I guess ,should be more powerful than the book. After his arrogance, to see Malkovich cowering beside a toilet bowl with his face burned is unforgettable. Eventually he returns to Cape Town and cowers before Melanie's family, asking forgiveness. It's not quite believed, but it's as much of a transformation as such a man is capable of. But it's Lucy's response that's more important: she refuses to report the crime, and refuses to leave. She cooperates with Petrus, who defends the youngest perpetrator. He turns out to be family, the son of his new wife's sister. He says it's over. Reconciliation. In fact, the attack may not have been so random.

David says it'll never be over and will be passed on to those who come long after them. This may be an endgame. But they were born here and they remain. The important thing is that Lucy stays, and so does David, after returning to Cape Town to apologize -- and be serviced by a prostitute.

The film, like the book (Like I'm told) is about humiliation, suffering, enduring. It's about sexuality and about living with other beings, other animals.

Viewers who don't find Disgrace "real" astonish me, though people and events are symbolic as well as specific, always richly both, and always simple and complex. David sleeps with Bev to please her, because she's lonely, and she wants it. Of course it's the sort of good deed that pleases him, but there is humility in it, as is his help, however unenthusiastic, with the animals. Malkovich's arrogance becomes complex because the most vivid images in the film are the ones of him cowering and afraid.

Disgrace is a film for smart people. It's as tightly coiled and thought-provoking as the review, and nearly as good.